HTC showing signs of life once again

So, the dust is settling after MWC and most of the big names have played the main cards that will shape their fortunes in the mobile market for the rest of the year.

HTC was one of the names we identified going into MWC as needing an upturn in fortunes, and most agree that the new devices it had to show off look promising. Now comes more good news: better than expected results from the latest quarterly financials.

Great phones with clever features get our attention every time over balance sheets and year-on-year revenue comparisons, but the numbers often tell their own story, and can be surprisingly revealing as an indicator of what's to come.

Take HTC, for example. A year and a half ago things could scarcely have been better, with handsets like the Desire sitting right at the top of the Android smartphone tree. Strangely, though, the financial figures didn't tell as encouraging a story, with investors getting cold feet because while things were still heading upwards, they weren't doing so as quickly as six months before.

Then came MWC 2011 and a fairly mundane offering based around twin Facebook phones that nobody could actually touch, as they weren't finished, and a whole bunch of model evolutions tagged with the letter S on the end.

Cue more disappointed investors, then talk of HTC having lost its way, complaints that it was swamping the market with products that were too similar, and calls for a new strategy.

That's where the HTC One X, One V and One S come in, of course, with HTC seemingly having decided to focus on quality, not quantity.

And just like the markets pre-empted a downturn last year, so HTC will be hoping its latest figures are signs of a positive turnaround 12 months later.

Things are still far from great – February revenues are down 37% on this time last year, after a 50% drop in January. Overall, Q1 revenues are expected to be 36% down on the Christmas period when the final numbers come in at the end of March, though there's always a drop of some degree in the new year.

HTC itself is making positive noises, saying it thinks its down-turn is “short term”, though to be fair what else would you expect? We will say this, though: we're a lot more optimistic about HTC now than we were a year ago.

And with Sony still largely getting its stall set up, Motorola distracted by lawsuits and takeovers and LG... well, being LG, HTC has a great chance here to re-establish itself as a strong second in the Android pecking-order behind Samsung, and who knows, to even give those Koreans something to think about.

because it looks good to investors... why do you think we had this crash for blizz companies love saying LOOK WE MADE A PROFIT then hiding the losses... the government does it by having external companies build hospitals and rent them back to the nhs over a 10 year period so it can take the price of its deficit.

The crash has nothing to do with ordinary companies not reporting profits correctly. It was banks getting involved in subprime debt and other risky banking strategies. The Government and the NHS don't have shareholders so that's an irrelevant point. How they arrange their terms is purely for a matter of short-termist convenience.

The crash has nothing to do with ordinary companies not reporting profits correctly. It was banks getting involved in subprime debt and other risky banking strategies. The Government and the NHS don't have shareholders so that's an irrelevant point. How they arrange their terms is purely for a matter of short-termist convenience.

their was a major issue with the overvaluing of companies worth. look at olympus they hid billions in losses to preserve their share price. all it takes is for a company to 'move' those losses to a particular area of the company (bit like sony does) then talk about profit from the major area to improve public (and by that shareholder) confidence.

we are matt. htc showing signs of life... were discussing how they work their figures